APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: iPhone
Intuitive is the Enemy of Good
In the previous instalment, I discussed an interview in which Alan Kay maligned growth-restricted user interfaces. Here’s the quote again: There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down … Continue reading
Conflicts in my mental model of Objective-C
My worldview as it relates to the writing of software in Objective-C contains many items that are at odds with one another. I either need to resolve them or to live with the cognitive dissonance, gradually becoming more insane as … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, Business, gnustep, iPhone, OOP, software-engineering, tool-support
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Garbage-collected Objective-C
When was a garbage collector added to Objective-C? If you follow Apple’s work with the language, you might be inclined to believe that it was in 2008 when AutoZone was added as part of Objective-C 2.0 (the AutoZone collector has … Continue reading
Posted in academia, architecture of sorts, gnustep, iPad, iPhone, Mac, OOP
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Lighter UIViewControllers
The first issue of Objective-C periodical objc.io has just been announced: Issue #1 is about lighter view controllers. The introduction tells you a bit more about this issue and us. First, Chris writes about lighter view controllers. Florian expands on … Continue reading
A two-dimensional dictionary
What? A thing I made has just been open-sourced by my employers at Agant: the AGTTwoDimensionalDictionary works a bit like a normal dictionary, except that the keys are CGPoints meaning we can find all the objects within a given rectangle. … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, OOP, performance, software-engineering
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Sideloading content into iOS apps
All non-trivial apps visualise content in some form, whether it’s game levels embedded in the app, data loaded from some internet service, or something else. In many cases the developer who’s writing the Objective-C code isn’t going to be the … Continue reading
Posted in iPad, iPhone, tool-support
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On community
This is a post that had been boiling for a while; I talked a little about the topic when I was in Appsterdam earlier this year, and had a few more thoughts which were completely supplanted and rearranged by watching
Posted in AAPL, advancement of the self, books, Business, iDeveloper.TV, iPhone, Mac, NSConf, OOP, Responsibility, software-engineering, Talk, WebObjects
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The debugger of royalty
We’ve all got little libraries of code or scripts that help us with debugging. Often these are for logging information in a particular way, or wrapping logs/tests such that they’re only invoked in Debug builds but not in production. Or … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, TDiOSD
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Why we don’t trust -retainCount
I’m pretty sure @bbum must have worn through a few keyboards telling users of StackOverflow not to rely on the value of an Objective-C object’s -retainCount. Why? When we create an object, it has a retain count of 1, right? … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, Foundation, iPad, iPhone, Mac
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On explaining stuff to people
An article that recently made the rounds, though it was written back in September, is called Apple’s Idioten Vektor. It’s a discussion of how the CCCrypt() function in Apple’s CommonCrypto library, when used in its default cipher block chaining mode, … Continue reading
Posted in books, Crypto, documentation, Encryption, iPad, iPhone, Mac, PCAS
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